Perfectly on song

Date: January 18 2013

Reviewed by Helen Razer

PERFECT TRIPOD: AUSTRALIAN SONGS

Eddie Perfect with Tripod

Until January 19

Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne

Bathos. It's as Australian as a bushfire plan and every bit as difficult to execute with care. Performer Eddie Perfect and comic musicians Tripod drench us in the stuff for an hour of all-Australian song. And, they deliver us by evening's end to safety.

This meeting of four lovely voices and funny blokes is not a high-risk exercise. It's a breezy summer show that demands little of its audience but laughter and the sum of years of experience from its stars.

Throughout a nearly a capella event, we enjoy the passage from low humour to high emotional notes. Sometimes, the fusion of delightful song with delightful smut works perfectly, as in the group's hilarious-but-heartbreaking version of Reminiscing by the Little River Band. Sometimes, things fall a little flat.

The occasional lapses in current may have a little to do with performers now governed by very different aesthetics. While Tripod maintains its reliable charm as forever-undergraduate lads who look, and sometimes sound, as though they've just got out of bed, Perfect now exists in an entirley different register.

This exceptional performer is newly possessed of an ease onstage that could make even the very practised look like the support act at a union bar.

Without Perfect, Tripod seem professionally unpolished. With Perfect they just seem a little unpolished. The guy is millimetres away from becoming a significant star.

Before that happens, however, Perfect can still join his friends for an evening of mildly blokey, very tuneful bathos.

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